We’ve had close to 20 group discussions during our time here. The response has been fantastic- with several having over 20 people.

Every subject from being an older single to the common myths about seniors has been explored. At last count we had well over 100 hours of video with more to come.

Being immersed in the older adult culture has given us insights that we wouldn’t have hypothesized at the beginning of this project. I went back yesterday and looked at past blog entries… somewhere along the way I stopped making observations such as, “This is an every day event for them…” to making observations such as, “This is an every day event for us…”

While I would say that we maintain our researcher’s objectivity, at some point you also enter the experiment yourself.

After doing a discussion group on packaging for older adults, I found myself shopping and wondering which products would genuinely be easy to open… and how I would open them if I was a senior.

Attached is a compilation of a few packages that we reviewed for their ease of opening and use. You’ll see that all the packages open, but not with the same ease. You’ll also hear suggestions like, “… I use a screw driver on those.” These older adults have their ways of getting into the packages they want, but they also desire packaging that they don’t have to assail and think about too much. When asked if it was reasonable to expect that a company could make a package that kept things fresh, was tamper-evident and was easy to open/close… the response was classic… “Absolutely… if we can put a man on the moon, we should certainly be able to do that.”